Mike Vizard

SAP and Deutsche Telekom announced at the Mobile World Congress 2018 conference a joint effort to re-engineer supply chains using their respective technologies. Under the terms of the alliance, SAP is integrating the application programming interfaces it exposes with Internet of Things (IoT) devices from Roambee Corp. that can be attached to the carrier’s wireless […]

An ERP application has always been an attempt to wrap code around a business process that enables both automation and standardization. Organizations that embrace packaged ERP applications would then write a lot of code to fill in the workflow gaps between business processes. But as ERP applications move into the cloud, providers of ERP applications […]

One of the areas where business process management (BPM) software is being most aggressively applied to transform a business process is field service. Huge armies of field service technicians are being armed with mobile applications and devices that often transform how an entire business operates. A new survey of 300 IT decision makers that work […]

Given how customer relationship management (CRM) has evolved into a major enterprise application over the last several years, it’s not much of a surprise that competition across the category has been fierce. But as sharp as that contest has been, all previous battles for market share between the dominant providers of CRM applications are about […]

The disconnect between IT and the rest of the business can usually be traced back to the fact that while developers know a lot about code, they don’t usually have a deep understanding of how the business works. To bridge that divide, organizations have been looking to empower business people to develop their own applications […]

The single biggest challenge with any customer relationship management (CRM) application is getting salespeople to use it. Most CRM applications are selected by sales and finance managers in collaboration with IT to improve revenue forecasting. The issue is that CRM applications require salespeople to enter data about customers that many of them view as their […]

As video becomes a more mainstream element of everything from sales and marketing collateral to training provided by the human resources (HR) department, managing all the video being produced is becoming exponentially more challenging. To enable organizations to rise to that challenge, IBM today extended the artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities it has infused into the […]

There’s always been a fierce debate between providers of packaged applications and developers of custom applications that goes to the root of any business process management strategy. Packaged application providers generally claim they have optimized a specific business process such as order-to-cash to the point where it no longer makes sense for organizations to develop […]

Business process management (BPM) as a category of software is highly fragmented because it’s really a catch-all term that spans everything from automating common workflow tasks to complex machine-to-machine interactions. There is usually a direction correlation between the number of machines and humans involved in a task and the robustness of the BPM solution being […]

At its core, the idea behind employing a customer relationship management (CRM) application is relatively simple. It provides a means through which organizations can holistically keep track of how they are engaging customers. In some instances, that’s as simple as providing a salesperson with an application that enables them to keep track of the customers […]

While digital business transformation is all the rage these days, many of the concepts being applied were originally pioneered over 20 years ago when various types of business process management (BPM) platforms were first developed. The primary difference between now and then is that BPM was primarily limited to use cases involving highly repeatable processes. […]

Now that the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has shipped version 3.0 of the Hadoop platform, providers of distributions of the Big Data platform are gearing up to support a wider number of classes of application workloads in 2018. Vinod Vavilapalli, development lead for Hadoop, MapReduce and YARN at Hortonworks, says the two most significant additions […]